Meta’s Instagram is stepping up efforts to protect youth on its platform with a new education campaign to help youth and parents identify and protect against sextortion scams. The campaign will be supported by a series of new safety features that help identify sextortion scams early on.
The campaign was developed in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorne and will launch next month in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It features informative videos outlining common tactics used by scammers, such as forcing photo exchanges and moving conversations off the platform.
The move comes as Congress works towards age restrictions on social media, with the Albanon government pledging to work with states and territories to establish a national framework. The new bill is promised to be introduced in parliament by the end of the year.
Mehta, which organizes public efforts to address youth safety in the face of federal crackdown, launched an Instagram teen account in Australia last month. These accounts have certain settings and features designed to protect youth, such as default private accounts, limited ad targeting, and restrictions on direct messages and interactions with adults who do not follow you.
The teen accounts were introduced a week after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the impending legislation, but Meta’s Australia managing director Will Easton said it had been “months in the making”. It is said that
The feature, which launches to coincide with Instagram’s new education campaign, is designed to further protect teens and make it harder for criminals to succeed. These include preventing screenshots and screen recordings, which scammers can use to capture explicit content without your consent. In-app safety notifications alert users to potential risks, and nudity protection helps prevent the sharing of explicit content. Protecting your followers and following list also makes it harder for scammers to target you.
Instagram said there are growing concerns about sextortion scams, where individuals are threatened with publishing explicit images unless they pay money or provide more explicit content. Instagram aims to create a safer online environment for young users by educating users about common scams and giving them tools to protect against them.
“The dramatic rise in sextortion scams is hitting children and teens hard, with online temptations reported to have increased by more than 300% from 2021 to 2023. Campaigns like this provide much-needed education to help families recognize these threats early on.” By educating young people and directing them to resources such as NCMEC’s CyberTipline and Take it Down. , we can better protect young people from becoming victims of online exploitation,” said John Shehan, Senior Vice President of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
